Manor now has an emergency room. On Wednesday, St. David’s HealthCare opened a free-standing ER that will operate in conjunction with its hospital on East 32nd Street in Austin.
The 10,840-square-foot facility at 10703 U.S. 290 East has 11 beds, plus the ability to do CT scans and X-rays. It can handle any emergency from fractures to strokes. The doctors and nurses will have the same emergency room training and certifications as the emergency room staff at St. David’s hospitals.
The goal of the city’s first emergency room is to stabilize patients and provide care until they can either go home or be transferred to another St. David’s hospital for an in-patient stay or surgical procedure.
Previously, residents of Manor in northeastern Travis County had to travel to Austin, Pflugerville or Round Rock to get to an emergency room, which could be a 20- or a 45-minute drive, or even more than an hour in heavy traffic.
“This is a dream come true,” said Manor Mayor Christopher Harvey. In 2023, the City Council created a plan to actively recruit medical providers to the city with the end goal of bringing a hospital there. This is the first step in that plan.
“Our intention is to use this as a catapult to attract more primary care and specialty care to the city,” he said.
Currently in Travis County, there are only two hospitals east of Interstate 35: Dell Children’s Medical Center in the Mueller neighborhood and Baylor Scott & White in Pflugerville.
“We are growing,” Harvey said. “If we don’t attract (medical providers) now and don’t build for future needs, we won’t have it.”
City leaders’ fear is that land will be built up and there will not be any left to house a regional hospital for the Manor-Elgin area.
The Manor area is six miles from a Tesla plant, six miles from a Samsung plant and 10 miles from another Samsung plant, three miles from Applied Materials, and more plants are forecasted for the area.
Right now the city has 34,000 residents and nearby Elgin, in northwestern Bastrop County, has 15,000 people, but the growth is coming. Manor has an additional 14,000 new homes in the works and Elgin another 18,000 residences.
The Manor/Elgin area is expected to grow from 49,000 people currently to 150,000 in the next five to seven years, and the U.S. 290 toll road is expected to expand into Manor, instead of stopping right before it. That will make commuting to Austin easier and help encourage more growth.
“What we have now will not meet the needs,” Harvey said of the city’s medical care. “It doesn’t meet the needs now.”
When St. David’s envisioned this emergency room it did not do what it has done in Kyle and Leander — plan a free-standing emergency room first with the intention of building a hospital in the near future. St. David’s did not purchase a tract of land big enough to add a hospital in Manor.
David Huffstutler, the president and CEO of St. David’s, said the hospital system does not have plans for a hospital yet in Manor, but of the new ER, he said, “we have wanted to be here for a long time,” he said. “We believe the need has been here for a long time.”
St. David’s Medical Center CEO Todd Steward said this emergency room will “serve as an extension” of his hospital, but now emergency care “will be just minutes away.”